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Discourse and the Problem of Closure in the Canterbury Tales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michaela Paasche Grudin
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Abstract

Critical restiveness with Chaucer's “unsatisfactory” endings points to one of his most profound strategies. In the Canterbury Tales Chaucer finds at least a dozen ways to ignore, skirt, transcend, or even anticipate structural closure in favor of an engagement between the narrative and its responding audience that fundamentally works against closure. By repeatedly subverting conventional closure, he turns our attention to the dynamics of discourse as social interaction. He creates in the Canterbury Tales a copia of the human motives—social, psychological, or political—that generate communication and misunderstanding. Chaucer's sense of closure casts light on the narrative frame and on the so-called Retraction. The subversion of conventional closure, instead of undermining the text, often enriches it, deeply characterizing his whole attitude toward discourse and toward knowledge. In Chaucer's epistemology nothing is ever complete.

Type
Cluster on Chaucer
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 5 , October 1992 , pp. 1157 - 1167
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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